New Interfaces from Motu

No, it just means they take more care in bringing you A more affordable, quality, product by using their knowledge to make cheaper parts work better in their systems than the competition using "better" parts.

I know how to read, and didn't base my grievance on this thread alone bro, u do it all the time. I said my piece, I'm done.

Yes, well, you're ugly and your wife dresses you funny.

Oh wait, I may have overstepped... can anyone trade insults?

Can we start an insult thread that we have to go to when we get all uppity?

I'm the Deep South(TM), USA.  95F with 95% humidity for like 4 months straight.  Sweat doesn't work here, so I hear ya on the perspiration persecution.

FWIW, I"m doing my first recording in 88.2kHz, and dang if I don't think plugins sound better at that sample rate. The audio sounds great too, but the difference is the plugins. I'm also following Bob O.'s advice about dithering. On every bounce and track freeze. Hasn't hurt.

I would think that, from a manufacturer's standpoint, it would be less costly to use high(est)-end parts right from the start rather than using lower-cost parts and spending time figuring out how to make them sound good. Where is the cost in R&D as opposed to parts? Or is it easier to recoup the cost of R&D over time, while the parts costs stay the same or increase? So many of the modifications that people pay to have done, either themselves or by someone else, seem to me to be simply exchanging some parts for higher-end/quality parts. I always wonder why wouldn't the manufacturer simply use the best parts right from the beginning? Sure it would cost a little bit more, but ?
Of course I'm referring to what would be considered professional products, as opposed to prosumer.

Ok, I'll elaborate on this but hopefully it won't be taken badly, because I'm going to counter most of these types of fallacies.  The simple answer is that the product is developed to meet the needs of the customer at large.  If the customers needed or wanted something else, it would be developed.  You are buying into the dis-satisfaction of a few vocal individuals who think they are always being cheated by the companies.  The other part of the answer is that "best parts" is opinion.

As probably one of the only Electrical Engineers on this forum, and one that has worked on products for the consumer and commercial marketplaces since the late 90's, I can offer some insight to the system of R&D.

I can without a doubt say that no manufacturer is solely driven by their costs, regardless of what anyone suggests.  For them to suggest this shows a gross misunderstading of business, or they have an agenda.   The manufacturers are never that short sighted as an unhappy customer is not a repeat customer.

As the process works:

1. You recognize a space in the product world that you can fill with a product.  Sometimes you search this out, sometimes customers ask you for a product to fill that void.
2. Your marketing team decides what features are necessary to those you wish to buy your product.
3. Your marketing and sales teams get together and decide if the potential sales will be enough to fund the R&D and the production of the product, with a margin of profit.
4. If all this works out, then the R&D team is brought in to counter the marketing requirements with what the R&D team can actually deliver. 
5. The development project is funded based on the amount of time the R&D and marketing teams have agreed upon.
6. Development moves on, designs change, features change as the teams make adjustments.  Usually the R&D has to make up for marketing requirement changes.  Late nights and weekends abound.
7. Prototypes, usually costing 10x the cost of the end product are produced as the production lines are brought up and purchase quantities are starting to be met for price breaks.
8. Pilot runs of product are made, testing out the processes used to make the product, the packaging and the product QA testing.
9. Initial products are sent to customers, then you wait for complaints, comments, fixes, and then you wait 30 days to a year for the first payments.

It's not unusual for a company to spend 2-4 million dollars on development of a high-quality, low-quantity product, most of which is salary for the employees of the company.  

Typical development is around 12-18 months for a complex system, and the expected lifetime of a product is around 8 years.  The company normally expects to break even around year 4 and profit for 4 more years afterwards before the next development cycle.

Parts prices drop pretty considerably when you buy quantities.  You also try to buy more common parts when possible, and avoid custom parts when possible.

I've been asked to keep costs down as much as possible, but it has never been a huge requirement.  The sales and marketing teams have a range of profit to hit, and a range of costs based on the consumer market and expected sales.  These are typically not hard to hit, and nobody expects miracles, but everyone expects problems.

An engineer will typically design in 25-30% higher performance than what is required to account for variation in parts and manufacturing.

TYPICAL profit margin for a smallish company is 30%.  If the product costs 100$, then 30$ is profit, the majority of which is used to pay the salaries of the employees.  Some products are more, some are less.

That being said, every company I've worked for and every engineer I've worked with has discussed this and the absolute consensus is that as long as the performance meets specification, R&D has the freedom to use the parts they need to use.

So you see, marketing and sales actually drive the specifications that R&D need to meet.  If the parts needed to be different to hit the specs, they would have been different in the design.  R&D is almost never hindered in this aspect.

Let me say it out loud.. If R&D thought the design needed different parts, the design would have different parts.

I'm going to say it again, it's a fallacy to think that every company penny pinches and screws the customer.  This is a logical fallacy because you are saying that the customer, who wants this product due to the product meeting their needs/requirements for the price is being screwed because they are buying a product that meets their needs for the price..  If that wasn't the case, then nobody would buy it and the company would discontinue the product or simply lose money and go out of business.  People will buy what meets their needs.  If something doesn't meet your needs, look elsewhere rather than blaming someone else for making something that a different person likes!

What the real problem here is that folks have been convinced that companies are always out to screw customers, usually by a vocal few.

As for "upgrades", I'll mention it again..  There are parts you can "drop in" and they will work better, and there are parts you can drop in that will not increase performance.  There are also parts that you can drop in that will decrease performance although the parts are "better".

A common place is the opamp.  Most audio opamps have bandwidth into the hundreds of Khz if not low Mhz, which is many orders of magnitude higher than you'd ever need for audio.  In fact, companies like SSL use common opamps like the NE5532/34 in devices with specs of 100Khz of audio bandwidth.  Why would you not need to "upgrade" a SSL console, yet a device using the same parts is suddenly a hunk of crap needing upgrading?  They don't.  What SSL does differently is that they do things smarter.

You've heard the saying:

Don't work harder, work smarter.

So a company that throws in an opamp with 100Mhz bandwidth which needs a ton of filtering(phase delay, noise ingress, nonlinearities, etc) to keep your local radio station from being modulated into your audio signal, is actually putting you behind compared to the product that uses an opamp with 100Khz bandwidth that doesn't need all that audio smearing filtering to deliver you the same audio bandwidth.  If someone tells you otherwise, they are probably just trying to sell you something.

Besides, the API2520 has a slew rate of around 3v/us..  Less than most of these "cheap" or "low quality" opamps..  So why the hate?

Having been involved in couple of products developments,
I have to disagree R&D seldom has the last word, at least with the big guys!
1. Often purchasing will over rule something because
A. We already Stock a capacitator in that value for X
B. We can't get that Cap in quantity in time for our planed product run.

2. In the time between when we started development and now your cost rose X amount and we still need to meet the old price point, so you need to bring your cost down.

3 Sorry guys everybody we showed the proto to said cool but we need to add... At our projected price, so make it happen.

4. This one is a pain, " no it needs to fit in the same chassis we use for The ____and ---.

5 Sorry we have to use a Wallwart for instant UL certification.

These are all but a few reasons I have seen for changes
in the course of development I have been involved in .